AT&T’s gigabit service matches Google Fiber’s price – if you let them spy on you

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For an industry that’s been defined by a lack of competition for at least a decade, the last few months have been tumultuous ones for the US broadband industry. Google has announced new fiber targets, the FCC intends to enforce a hybrid net neutrality system, and municipal broadband’s ability to compete with existing cable and telco companies have all been hot topics. Now, AT&T is bringing its own fiber capabilities to Kansas City. Even better, it’s perfectly willing to price-match Google — if you’ll put up turning all your internet surfing data over to the company.

AT&T refers to this as its “Gigapower Internet Preferences” program and according to the company, it’s a huge benefit. AT&T says it can offer a $30 discount on its fiber service because you (the paying customer) “let us use your individual Web browsing information, like the search terms you enter and the web pages you visit, to tailor ads and offers to your interests.”

AT&T also markets the data-vacuuming version of its service as the “Premier” flavor, peons who aren’t willing to hand AT&T all of their personal information and web browsing habits have to make do with “Standard” Internet. Again, it’s obvious what the intent is — offer people a $30 discount and the word Premier as opposed to Standard, and the overwhelming majority of people are going to choose the former over the latter.

Repeated attempts to tease out exactly what AT&T collects and how it collects it have failed, the company told GigaOm that it uses “various methods” and that it continually reviews these methods. It promises not to collect information from secure connections or “otherwise-encrypted” sites, and of course says it won’t sell personal information. This ignores the fact that there’s literally no such thing as anonymous data. Given sufficient volume, the data habits of any specific person can be reconstructed.

A simple way to illustrate this issue is to consider your cell phone. Let’s say your cell phone carrier bundles your cell phone’s location data along with the data of every other person in your city, then sells it to an advertiser. All the advertiser receives is a list of which devices were where over a 24 hour period. The advertiser wants to identify areas where mobile users walk frequently, so it compiles this information over a week.

Our hypothetical advertiser may not have phone numbers, names, or personal addresses, but it can see that Person A3725 takes the 7:15 AM train to 5th Street, walks two blocks to 1234 Jefferson Ave, spends the day there, and then returns home on the 5:55 train. Look up the identity of 1234 Jefferson Street, cross reference against Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn, and you’re well on your way to identifying which person, specifically, you’re looking at.

You’re the product, whether you pay for it or not

AT&T actually began deploying this system several years ago, but it’s continuing the rollout in the face of services like Google Fiber, which doesn’t employ any kind of user tracking that’s specific to the ISP itself. Ever since services like Gmail and Facebook became popular, there’s been a common adage used to describe them — “If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product.”

Paid opt-out services like this one make it clear that we’re now firmly past that halcyon era. Now, you’re the product whether you pay for it or not. It would be one thing if AT&T’s $30 privacy fee included a blanket “Don’t be tracked” rule, meaning you’d be paying for something as close to anonymous Internet as its possible to get while still meeting federal laws and guidelines. AT&T reserves the right to collect data no matter what, as detailed in its privacy policy.

It’s not clear whether the new rules proposed by the FCC would prevent this kind of monetization or not. AT&T isn’t offering paid priority and it’ s not attempting to establish any kind of fast vs. slow lanes. The company is offering a data brokerage service at a discount. The size of the discount is almost certainly larger than the value of any single person’s data, but it’s not clear that the company is legally required to match the size of any discount to the value of the data customers hand over. In theory, AT&T might fall afoul of regulators if its actually replacing advertising on websites with its own targeted ads, but there’s no evidence it does so.

Privacy-minded users will be best served by a different gigabit provider — AT&T’s refusal to disclose exactly how they gather their information means that it’s very difficult to predict whether VPNs or encrypted traffic can slip past their dragnet. The general rule of thumb is that ISPs can trump or at least weaken most client-side efforts to obfuscate traffic, and while that’s not an absolute, it’s probably not worth fighting over if you’re concerned about privacy in the first place.

Also, for those of you keeping score at home — despite threatening to suspend its fiber rollouts if net neutrality happened, AT&T is now pushing ahead with those plans regardless.

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